


BALANCE!

by Golden_Ticket



Series: TOGETHER! [4]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Adulting is hard, Babies, Children, F/M, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Marriage, Parenthood, Pregnancy, Sexy Times, coach!scott, family fic, mentions of eating disorders, mentions of unwanted groping, tessa writes a book
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-05-29 15:47:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15076451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Golden_Ticket/pseuds/Golden_Ticket
Summary: orTen Chapters***Once she is left completely to her own devices she takes the book back into her hands, runs her fingers over the waxy cover and looks at her face on there. She’s photographed from the waist up, holding both her palms to the sky like a Justice statue with a high ponytail, on each palm a set of figurines that have been well photoshopped in later (getting that right had taken quite a few reworks by the graphic design department of her publisher). On her left, the figurines are a little family on a mountain of furniture and pots, bowls and baby-bottles while on the right, it’s books and clothes, calculators, pens and shoes. Above it says “BALANCE” and in the sub-line: “A totally subjective guide to figuring out life”. Underneath that is her ‘new’ nameTessa Virtue-Moir. She had debated going just by Virtue for her authordom but somehow that hadn’t felt right.***Tessa wrote a book. And it was aride. // Sequel to BEHAVE!





	1. Foreword

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaand here we go again. This is the sequel to BEHAVE! from the TOGETHER! series but can be read on its own!
> 
> Updates will come hopefully weekly, maybe more often if I can manage it. 
> 
> This will be chaptered and down the line will contain mentions of eating disorders. If that triggers you, I want to have said this here on the first chapter (no mention of it in this one tho!) but just so you know that this will come up, so of you would rather sit this story out, that is fine too—the chapters in question will have separate trigger warnings too though.
> 
> Regarding the story in general..I will do my very best to give you a glimpse into Tessa Virtue's lifestyle book, excerpts of which will preface every new chapter. I have zero idea how to live a balanced or fancy life...so take all life advice here with a grain of salt, I don't know jack shit about anything.
> 
> (Also there is smut in this very first chapter, I don't know how that happened, sorry?)

**_Foreword_ **

 

_When I set out to write this book I had a head full of ideas about how to make it worthwhile, to offer insights into life as a professional athlete and a business woman, to maybe also share a bit of what I have learned in a 25+ year partnership with another human being —both professional and personal— and say to fellow Moms out there: It’s okay, I don’t know what I’m doing either…but here is a cute sewing pattern for a baby dress._

 

 _What I found when I sat down to actually start writing was that I had no idea where to begin. And so I didn’t. I put the “project” into the future, thinking ‘tomorrow’ at first and ‘next week’ after some of those ‘tomorrow’’s had passed. And isn’t that something we like to to? Put things off and bury our heads in the sand when we have work coming for us we don’t necessarily know how to get started on? Meanwhile I had a first, tentative deadline approaching, which, after I missed that, became a_ firm _deadline and my husband was making fun of me for flunking on this book that I had wanted to write so much._

 

 _He reminded me more than once of who I am, those days that I sat in front of my laptop with two small children taking apart my house thinking that I couldn’t do it, that I was going to have to go to my publisher and confess that I am not an author and have to return the advance with my tail between my legs, feeling uncertain and discouraged. “Remember that you’re a fighter, remember to find your balance and remember to_ breathe _,” is what my husband told me time and time again and eventually, I did remember. And I started fighting, being mindful of the process and striving for honesty and kindness with myself. Quickly I learned that once I got started, once that I had found my voice, found my way of expressing myself, it all fell into place. In the end, I had the bones of this book finished in a little over five weeks._

 

_I was ridiculously proud of myself and I still am overjoyed that you are holding this in your hands right now, printed and bound and real. I hope that in reading it, the two of us can work through some of the intricacies of life together, that I can share with you what I learned along the way and that you have things to take away for yourself—and maybe share with me?_

 

_I would love to hear of your experiences, where you have struggled to get started on a big project or find balance in your life and how you wound up finding it. While I might not be able to respond to everyone, I will absolutely read all of your words and look forward to them all._

 

_Send in your stories and experiences to share@balance-book.ca or tag your Instagram pictures #sharebalance_

 

_And please, always remember to shine._

 

* * *

 

Within the first week of her book being out on the shelves across Canada and available worldwide via Amazon, Tessa’s publishing house reports thousands of e-mails getting in and their server crashing twice on the first two days of the e-mail address being active. Halfway through her editor Karlee giving her the actual number of responses over the phone, Tessa has to sit down, running her palm across the dark hardwood of the dining table in their Montreal home. How will she ever read all of those, let alone respond to them? 

 

“I can send them to you in bundles of fifty?” Karlee offers. “I’ve already pre-marked a couple that you’d maybe like to respond to and of course we’re sorting out anything that’s spam or trolling.”

“Thank you so much,” Tessa says and gets up, letting her coffee cool down a little bit as she takes out a copy of that shiny new book of hers from its place on the shelf in the living room (having slotted in perfectly next to the first editions of the Tessa-and-Scott book and its re-worked version that followed years later after a second set of Gold medals won at an Olympic Games). The spine of her very first self-written non-fiction book is still un-cracked because she had not had the time yet to do much more than flip through the pages with her kids, to entertain their nosiness and to check how the pictures had printed (well!). 

 

“But it’s going good so far, eh?” Tessa asks the woman on the other line, weighing the book in her  free hand, finding that it’s good and solid, not too heavy but with that reassuring hardcover-feel to it.

“Very good, yeah,” says Karlee. “Doing a bit more press before the release was a good call, especially the two book blog things we got on board. They got pretty impressive clicks. Bet we sold some copies on that alone.”

“And Scott’s chapter, that helped too,” Tessa laughs, remembering how little her husband had been interested in actually writing himself but she had had the idea pretty early on once she finally got to the conceptual stage of the book. 

 

She had wanted to have a chapter on identity in there and since writing about ones own identity got any regular person only so far, in her case especially, what with her occasionally skewed view on the topic, it had made sense to involve someone who looked at her from the outside but still knew her well. So she had asked Scott to offer his perspective on the matter and after some talking him into it, he had agreed. Because nobody else in the world knew her as well as he did. (Even if he hadn’t technically written down anything in the end, merely made a voice recording which she later typed up and edited…so the chapter wasn’t technically _his_ either, it was still her words in the bulk of it, there were just some ten text bubbles with comments from him about her and their life together scattered around her writing.) When her publisher had announced that Scott was also going to be a little bit involved, her twitter mentions had reached some long forgotten Post-Olympics heights for a day or two and the pre-orders for the book had climbed dramatically, enough for Karlee to get a little bit emotional when she’d called Tessa over it. People still care a lot about her marriage, it seems, still care to know how Tessa-and-Scott feel about each other, in some cases enough to buy an entire book for just one chapter of his words on the matter.

 

But anyway, adding the chapter in had not been an economic decision to push sales, even if some people on the internet had decided —before the book even dropped— that it was. That she was only using her husband for profit and more ugly assumptions in that same vein, but that wasn’t it. (Yes, it was a welcome side-effect, that people wanted to get her book because they wanted some insights into their relationship which was still very much private but it wasn’t the reason it came to be.) The reason Scott is in the book is that it’s a book about her life and Scott is the cornerstone of that life. And if there was no mention of him, half of it would not make sense. So he is in there. And their children are, too, even if there aren’t too many private anecdotes and no current pictures of their faces, just one of each when they were babies and the very few newer ones showing just the back of their heads. 

 

That’s the decision she had made as an author and a public person and her family was okay with it. So she could live with a couple of faceless campaigners on the internet, trying to paint her as a money-hungry exploiter of private stuff for financial gain. She knew the truth and some people had always gotten a kick out of painting her as some kind of a villain, so that was that. She did not expect this to change no matter what she did, so she lived by her own rules and tried to find her authenticity in her public persona the way she saw fit. Seriously, screw those people anyway, she was too old and too busy to deal with that kind of negativity.

 

“Yeah, Scott’s chapter is definitely a buzz point,” Karlee says, very much not negative, sounding like the human equivalent of a sun flower (which was incidentally kind of what she looked like, golden brown skin and yellow-y blonde braids wound tightly around her head). “We’ll keep an eye on how we fare in week two, if we can keep our top spot on the Non-Fiction list.”

“So we can get that Bestseller-sticker on the second edition,” Tessa jokes and sits back down at her living room table, trading in the book for her coffee mug and takes a sip.

“That’s the plan,” Karlee says cheerily on the other line. “So, we’re good for now. I’ll send you the e-mails and you can just give me a heads-up when you’d like me to send more.”

“Yes, I’ll try and see how much I can get done today. Scott took the kids to CanSkate workshop at Gadbois,” Tessa tells her. “So I’ve got a little time to myself.”

 

“Oh, how nice,” Karlee enthuses. “Is Mia skating already, too?”

“I don’t think he’ll put her on skates today, no,” Tessa muses, although she wouldn’t be surprised if Scott got their almost two year old out on the ice again for the occasion, just for the heck of it. “Bellamy started for real at two but Mia isn’t as sure on her feet. We tried with her in London over Christmas but she could barely walk then, let alone skate. But, I don’t know, Scott might try.” 

 

“How’s Bellamy doing?” Karlee asks.

“Oh, you should see him,” Tessa laughs. “He’s started coaching the other kids at the rink. Three and a half and he’s a natural already! It’s hilarious, it’s almost worse in Ballet class. They let us sit in on the last ten minutes every other week and the other day Bell’s like, whispering to the girls before him at the barre to extend their legs better. And at the rink he goes: ‘Bend you knees’, ‘Bend. And. _Push_!’. And he just…makes Scott’s faces and you can see that he’s basically just trying to copy him but it’s so precious. We just gotta reign that in a little I guess, so the other kids don’t get annoyed. Not that Bell’s wrong with his notes. Neither on the rink nor at the studio…but you know. Teach humility and all that.”

“Yeah,” Karlee chuckles. “But he’s bound to be a natural with parents like you guys.”

“I guess time will tell,” Tessa grins, imagining her son out skating today, before ending the call on some sincere pleasantries and the promise to talk again soon.

 

Once she is left completely to her own devices she takes the book back into her hands, runs her fingers over the waxy cover and looks at her face on there. She’s photographed from the waist up, holding both her palms to the sky like a Justice statue with a high ponytail, on each palm a set of figurines that have been well photoshopped in later (getting that right had taken quite a few reworks by the graphic design department of her publisher). On her left, the figurines are a little family on a mountain of furniture and pots, bowls and baby-bottles while on the right, it’s books and clothes, calculators, pens and shoes. Above it says “BALANCE” and in the sub-line: “A totally subjective guide to figuring out life”. Underneath that is her ‘new’ name _Tessa Virtue-Moir_. She had debated going just by Virtue for her authordom but somehow that hadn’t felt right. 

 

And then there is her face. _Ah, that old thing._ That had taken some convincing too to leave in the few wrinkles she had gathered in the past seven years since the last time it had been on a book cover. In the first draft they had photoshopped her to all hells, so that she barely looked twenty-five as opposed to the thirty-six that she was. The truth is she does not feel old (outside of the rink that is, she is still getting used to not being able to do everything she had been capable of in her twenties…but having two children in the span of three years had taken her off the ice for quite some time and the few shows Scott and her still skated weren’t nearly enough to get her back into anything even resembling Olympic shape). 

 

Truthfully, she doesn’t feel much older or wiser than she had been in her late twenties. Nothing in her life feels like it has aged really, not even with the kids and a marriage going on six years now. Her relationship certainly does not feel old. Scott doesn’t feel old to her either, even if he keeps harping about how very very old he feels to himself. (He’s still a goof and about as energetic as he had been at thirteen, so she doesn’t really buy any of that anyway.)

 

She reclines in her chair and opens the book up properly for the first time since it had been special-delivered to her at the beginning of the week and she has to laugh as she looks at the first page that has another picture of her, because of course there’s a stain on it. Strawberry marmalade (home-made by her husband, if you would believe it) by the looks of it. She does not recall when it had gotten there or which of her children was to blame for it but trying to figure that out was about as useless as it was with all the other stains in her house and on her clothes. (Needless to say that the white couches she had once owned had made way for dark navy ones because if Scott and his Hockey-snacking hadn’t done the job, their two darling children, with their knack for getting anything at all as dirty as anyhow possible, certainly had.)

 

She skims the foreword, frowning as she reads the suggestion to her readers to send her stories. It had seemed like a good —like a _cute—_ idea at the time but she had not expected to be quite as relevant still as to warrant thousands of replies but here they are, apparently. The other thing her eye catches on is the part where she wrote how proud she is of that book. And that is 100% true. Because in the beginning, it had very much not wanted to be written. She still remembers so clearly how she left the publisher’s office in Toronto the day she signed the deal and gone over the first tentative timeline for the project. She’d felt accomplished and ready to claim the world—thinking that she was really everything she hoped to help other women be with that book of hers. A successful business woman and a kickass mother. Honestly. She had brought Bellamy with her  like some big city amazon warrior and carried him on her very wide, very five-month-pregnant hip. Out of the office in a smart maternity outfit with Bell matching, a picture perfect image of the modern woman. Like her mother had been, working and succeeding in the business world while raising kids and taking names. Like Beyonce. _Who ran the world? Tessa!_

 

A day later, she was back in Montreal and Scott had taken Bell to the rink with him and she sat down to write. And then found that she couldn’t. 

 

Nothing was happening on that blank page on her MacBook’s writing application, nothing but that waiting pulse of the little line-thingie there at the top left croner, daring her to start. Mocking her. Days went by like this, then weeks. And then she claimed maternity leave, having not written a single chapter. Just a couple of askew sentences here and there that didn’t even amount to a base structure. She cut herself some slack when she was nine months pregnant, ready to pop really and thoroughly tired of her state but in the back of her mind, she still felt the weight of all those unwritten chapters, that stupid flickering line yelling “You’re crap at this, why did you ever think you could write a book?”.

 

“Babe,” Scott said, some mid-June day when Mia’s due date had come and gone and Tessa was lying in bed like a beached whale, unable to do much more than watch Netflix, waddle to the toilet occasionally and wait to go into labour (which was stubbornly not happening). “Any more staring and the ceiling is going to come down and burry us.”

 

She turned her head and glared at him and was about to say something, about how she didn’t want to write the stupid book anymore, when the baby monitor rustled and they both held their breaths. They were trying to get Bellamy to go to sleep with marginally less fuss than usual, hoping to at least get that out of the way before baby number two came. Thankfully, that night, he did them the favour and just babbled a little to himself before eventually falling silent. once Scott had decided that he wouldn’t have to get up again, he moved from where he stood inside the doorway of their en-suite bathroom and changed into his sleep-wear. (Which was basically taking off his pants, socks and shirt.) Before he could join her in bed though, Tessa held up her hand to make him pause.

 

“Hm?” He asked. “D’you need anything?”

“Just wondering how my legs are doing,” she asked him, because she obviously hadn’t really seen them in a while.

“Nice and furry,” he nodded and then laughed. “Like a proper Mama bear.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry, as soon as I can bend down again, I’ll be right back to silk and smooth, I promise.”

“Sweetie, we’ve been over this,” he sighed in turn and finally climbed into bed with her. “I don’t give a single shit about any hair anywhere on your body. You could be covered in a pelt from head to toe and I’d still be fucking crazy about you.” (Since he was forbidden from cursing anywhere else in the house, he had developed the habit of getting all of his expletives out in the safety of their bedroom, which made for a very Oldschool-Scott experience when contrasted with the Dad-version of him she was blessed with everywhere outside of their bed.)

 

“I know,” she told him, snuggling as close as she could, which was not very, but he helped, working his arm underneath her head until it rested on his shoulder and the other arm landed on her monstrous belly, bunching up the fabric of her tent-sized sleep shirt where he stroked lazy circles onto it. “I still feel gross,” Tessa said. “And not sexy.”

“You’re very sexy to me,” her dear husband whispered and kissed the side of her face. “When you’re not being mean, that is…or actually, you’re still pretty sexy then too.”

“I’m _not_ mean,” she snapped (sounding _very_ mean indeed) and he laughed. “I’m having your baby, you don’t get to call me mean.”

“I’m sorry,” Scott said and she could hear the smirk on his face without having to look at him.

 

She couldn’t have looked for long either because then he turned around, bending over her upper body and kissed her, still grinning. She could tell from the first contact that he was in a _mood_ and she wished she could reciprocate but everything below and around her navel felt tight and taut and very much did not like to be touched. Which was a weird sensation in combination with how much she was getting turned on by the way he was kissing her at the same time. Scott felt it too, intensifying his ministrations and nibbling her mouth open to deepen the kiss. Gauging her reactions, he chanced a reach down her body once she’d moaned against his lips. In a trained motion, he put a flat palm over her sex softly—and she flinched.

 

“Not good?” He asked, halting all movement immediately. 

“No,” she groaned. “It still hurts, I’m sorry. I wish I could just go the fuck into labour already.”

He hummed, removed his hand from between her legs and put it back on her belly again (her boobs had been off limits for the last two months because those bitches hurt even worse than her downstairs area, sadly).

“Are you really strung out?” She asked him on a whisper after he’d kissed her again and instead of answering with his lips (so as to put them on hers again), he rolled his hips against her side and she could feel him harden against her thigh. Her breathing stuttered. Oh, what she would have given to go some four or five months back in time then. So she could have his way with him while only moderately pregnant instead of ridiculously so.

 

She turned in his embrace, as gracefully as she could, and he followed, so that they both ended up on their sides, facing each other. His eyes locked with hers and he smiled. He had a man’s face now. Fully grown-up, some untended-to beard stubble included (which she knew he sported on occasion just because he could finally grow it properly). But his eyes were still just the same they had been at nine, and at fourteen and at twenty-two. Those warm brown eyes that could coax every last secret out of her. They talked, for a while, just like that without words, like they always had, only regarding each other. It was promises of love and desire they shared, even if their circumstances kept them apart but then Tessa had an idea. And grinned with it, fiendishly enough to give him pause.

“What?” He asked, stopping the hand that had snuck over to her, running up and down her upper arm.

 

“Touch yourself,” she commanded. And then he grinned, too. Oh, he was game for that.

 

He retracted the hand and flopped down onto his back but kept his face turned to her, his eyes on hers. She licked her lips to give him something else to look at while she watched his hand run down his bare chest and then he used his other one to help pull his boxer briefs down as far as the angle allowed. Tessa was enraptured by the view, throat drying up, captured by how he sprung free from the confines of his underwear. At the sight of him already as hard as he was, she bit into her bottom lip hard and suppressed a grunt with little success. He laughed, throaty and small, which made her look at his face again.

 

“How?” He asked her and her eyes flitted down to his hands again, one now resting on that spot where his thigh and hip met, where he liked it when she scratched him when she was going down on him, the other one ghosting above his dick. “Fast or slow?”

“Hmpf,” she breathed and closed her eyes for a second, wet her lips again and opened both mouth _and_ eyes to murmur: “Start slow.”

 

He listened, started to touch himself and watched her while doing it. She let him take his pleasure for a while, studying his face as it tightened and grew severe, as his brow furrowed and his breathing hitched. Only when his arm started moving too fast for her liking, did she pull on his arm, pulled it up to her face and sucked his index and middle finger into her mouth, careful to get them as wet as possible as she licked, staring at him staring at her with his jaw clenched tight and pupils blown out. He twitched beside her, shuddering. And then he worked a third finger into her mouth on a groan and pushed his digits further down her throat until she almost gagged (he didn’t do this often, finding it a bit barbaric himself but she liked it and he liked that she did, so sometimes he did end up with half a hand down her throat). She nodded, almost imperceptibly and he understood, taking his wetted hand back and then back down again.

 

“Slow,” she warned him and he sputtered out a whimper. “Be a good boy for me.”

“Fuck,” he whispered but obeyed, his arm moving deliberately, setting a slow rhythm that made him suck his bottom lip into his mouth, his eyes looking for purchase in hers.

“Stop,” she commanded after a few minutes of this and he winced, doing as he was bid. “Wait.”

He did, keeping immobile until his ribcage rose and fell heavily with the effort to hold back and his eyebrows arched up into a pleading grimace, his mouth falling open.

“Please,” he breathed but she shook her head.

“ _Wait_ ,” she said.  “How often did you do this when we were younger? Huh? Thinking about me?”

“Fuck, Tess, so many times,” he replied, so fast and so hotly, it was like a small explosion.

“Go faster,” she rewarded his honesty. “But just a little.”

 

He echoed his choice swear words on a sigh and picked the self-tantalising movements back up, keeping her fixed in his gaze, only momentarily distracted by her propping herself up on her elbow in order to reach down his body and touch his stomach, fleetingly, butterfly-grazing his skin, the muscles rippling beneath.

“Tell me,” she ordered. “Tell me about the first time you did this thinking about me.”

“Ah, I don’t remember,” he struggled to speak. “I was young. _You_ were young. Too young for me to be…aah, thinking about you like that.”

“Did you have a filthy mind?” Tessa asked him, finding that she did enjoy this immensely. She wasn’t usually one for dirty talk but she had always liked asking him things. And he looked at her so scandalised, like he couldn’t believe her, like he was going to burst with wanting her and she really liked _that_ too.

 

“Fuck, T,” he growled. “You have no idea. I felt so dirty.”

“How old?” She demanded.

“I was seventeen,” he said, bucking his hips into his palm, stroking himself harder.

“Liar,” she said. And grabbed his wrist firmly, making him stop. “How old?”

“Holy…,” he breathed. “No. Fuck, Tess, please.”

“The first time you thought of me when you fucked your hand,” she said, upping the ante on her vocabulary and his hand spasmed underneath her grip, making a fist around his cock. “Tell me, or I’ll never let you come.” 

He looked at her, begging, but she was relentless. “Tess,” he whined. 

“Tell me.”

 

“When you got that fucking belly ring,” he finally ground out and she rewarded him by removing his and closing her own hand around his length as best as the angle allowed, making him shake into her grip. She’d been thirteen when she got it. An act of defiance and prepubescent rebellion from an otherwise welly well-adjusted girl. He’d just turned fifteen a month earlier.

“Tell me,” she ordered and stroked him, hard and slow. “When you saw it, what did you think?”

“Nothing, I thought nothing,” he whimpered, bucking into her hand helplessly. “I just _felt_ …I just felt things. I didn’t want to think of you when I got off, I mostly thought of…argh, fu-…actresses or models but then you got that…fuck, fucking belly ring and I just…I thought about touching it, thought about you touching me. I didn’t want to.”

 

“When did you _want_ to?” She asked him, adding a twist of her wrist to her pumps, the one she knew drove him half insane. “Think about me?”

“Later,” he exhaled. “Canton.” She picked up the pace. 

“Did you do it often?” She asked and one of his hands found her face, then her neck, his thumb pushing down slightly on her windpipe (and this made her lose herself on a low rumbling moan for a second as he was coming apart under her touch).

“So many times,” he told her and stared into her eyes as she jerked him off sloppier and faster. “I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t come if I didn’t picture you. I wanted you. So badly.” 

“Do you wanna come now?” She asked him, one last question and his eyes bulged as he nodded fervently.

“ _Please_ ,” he begged and then she nodded, kicking into overdrive as the hold he had on her neck tightened and then his head bopped and his eyes closed and on a whimpering, open-mouthed “ow” he came hot and sticky all over her hand and onto his stomach.

 

It took forever until he breathed normally again, long enough for Tessa to roll over, which was a task in her whale-state, and get the tissue box from her bedside table, clean her hands off of his spend and his body too. 

“Shit,” he breathed, winded and gasping for air once she was resting on her back once more. She looked at him, tilting her head, slightly out of breath from the exertion. “You’re a fucking freak, Tessa Virtue.” He said this with such love and affection, her heart missed a couple of beats.

“Just trying new things,” she shrugged nonchalantly, even if he kind of had her at a disadvantage now because she was still desperately riled up but couldn’t get off like he had because just being turned on kind of hurt. “So I don’t become a frigid old housewife.”

 

He huffed out a laugh. “Of all the things that you could be, I think frigid old housewife is not one of them.”

“Author isn’t one either, apparently,” she sighed and he paused, rolling to his side after rolling _up_ his underwear.

“You’re literally about to have a baby,” he said tenderly. “I don’t think you need to be worrying about that book right now.”

“But I wasn’t that pregnant when I started working on it…or not working on it, rather,” she sighed, fumbling for his hand between them, putting it on her body again, to rest on her stomach. “I just don’t know what to write about.”

“Well, I think the title should give you a pretty good idea,” Scott mused. “Balance and everything?”

 

“Yeah, but…where do I start?” She asked. “What can I tell anybody about balance anyway? What the heck do I know?”

“Babe, I think you’re doing alright? You’re an amazing Mom to soon to be two children, you have a lifestyle empire-” (Tessa grunted out a laugh about the “empire” bit because that was hardly true, she merely had a dance and sport’s wear line, designed greeting cards and jewellery for partners, and founded a small charity that offered workshops to girls in sports. So things were going alright but she was hardly changing the world or anything.) “Don’t scoff, you’re doing amazing. You raised your own company from the ground up within two years and then also started raising a baby with a good for nothing husband that is more work than help, you’re fantastic.”

 

“You’re not more work than help,” she protested. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“Yes, you could,” he said. “You can do everything. And you definitely _can_ write that book. But first, we kinda have this other thing we need do, right?” She rubbed her belly lightly and then frowned while Scott was looking at her stomach for a moment and then back at her to say: “Mia is kicking up a storm.” (Different from Bellamy, naming Mia had taken about five minutes. Scott had barely helped Tessa into the car after the appointment where they found out the sex, pointed at her belly and said “Mia?”. Tessa had squealed in delight and that had been that.)

 

“Tell me about it,” Tessa sighed. Some time between reaching for the tissue box and dabbing off come from her husband’s stomach, her daughter in her belly had decided it was time to learn how to tap-dance against her mother’s abdominal wall. “She wants out of there too, I think.”

“Do you think she minds being upside down for so long now?” Scott mused, gently feeling for his daughter's feet where they made bumps underneath Tessa’s skin pointing at her breasts.

“Nah, she’s fine,” she said. “But she could come out anytime. She’s in the right position.” She patted her belly softly. “You hear that, Mia? Any day now is fine!”

“She’ll get here,” Scott nodded. “And so will that book.”

 

 

He’d been right in the end, Tessa thinks, almost two years later where she sits at her living room table and turns the pages to the beginning of the first chapter of her first book. She takes a sip from her coffee that is now good to drink and settles in. Starting to read, she is very content to relive the experiences she’s had while writing it. Indulging in her free morning while stepping steadfastly onto memory lane before she will need to get started on responding to the first batch of e-mails.

 

And hopes to God she won’t find any spelling mistakes in that shiny new book of hers. If there are, she’ll probably get mail about it.

 


	2. Work/Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of unwanted groping. Please steer clear of this chapter if this bothers you!
> 
> ***
> 
> Thank you so much for your patience!! I just started a new very fun, very exciting job and it takes a LOT of my time. So I am trying to write as much as I can but it's not always easy.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this instalment as we are starting to delve into the realness beyond the narrative.  
> As always, I appreciate your thoughts and comments ever so much!!

**_Chapter One: Work/Life_ **

 

_[…]_

 

 _So clearly, for the longest time, I was not good at balancing my work and my personal life. That’s evidently because my life_ was _work. From a very young age, I prioritised my career over my social life and to a certain degree, I prided myself on that. There were no semi-formals for me, no trips to the mall with my friends on a Friday. No parties, no prom, not even real weekends for the most part. My teenage years were bits of school wedged in between skating practices. I moved away from home when I was thirteen years old and then to another country at fifteen. My family was my skating partner, who was a kid himself. But we were determined to get better, we wanted to win, we wanted to be the best ice dancers in the world and everything else shrank in the face of that goal, blurred next to this vision of our athletic career and where we could take it._

 

_Skating was my life, even if my mother had raised me to not let myself be defined by my sport. I tried to not have it be my whole existence by cultivating other interests like reading, golfing and learning about fashion but mostly, I was a skater. There was no way around it. I was a skater and that was my work. Meanwhile, my social life consisted mainly of Scott, simply due to our circumstances. There is no other person in the world that I have spent as much time with as I have with him. We grew up side by side, closer than twins, really. Through the good and the bad and the better, through the highs and lows of an amateur athletic career and a personal relationship that wasn’t always easy to navigate._

 

_From nine years old until after the Sochi Olympics, my “balance” had been severely off-kilter. In numbers, it would have been 80% work and 20% life, that life marked by deprivation and restrictions. Incidentally, for the longest time, this had also been my ratio for my personal relationships (80% Scott and 20% outside relationships). And then it all ended and I decided to take a year of ‘Yes’ and grab new opportunities as they presented themselves vigorously. I longed to finally see the other side of the world, the side that was not ruled by rink time and diets. Funnily enough, I wasn’t in the best place at this point in my personal development but I was excited to be ‘free’, in a way, and to explore my options. Finally, I wanted to live a mundane and regular life._

 

 _I learned very quickly that I had no idea how to do that at all. Scott regularly says how he transitioned poorly after Sochi and during our flirtation with retirement. But I did not fare much better. He will tell you that he tried to make himself believe that he enjoyed a life of parties and leisure when it really did not make him happy at all but_ I _tried to reinvent myself so rigorously that  a few months in, I barely recognised myself. I had tried so hard to find myself after basically living behind my_ Tessa Virtue _mask for so long, that I completely dismantled who I had been beneath because my work/life balance had been so askew I believed my personality itself was a scam, or rather, a construct designed for work. I had lived off of my work, I had_ been _my work. And then I suddenly had so much_ life _on my hands, I did not know who I was. Unsurprisingly, I also had no idea who I was without Scott and I felt the strong need to figure that out which made things difficult between us for a while._

 

 _It took us a year to get to separate places of peace, with who we were as people and how we had restructured our lives, and we made a point to not sit down and earnestly discuss a possible Comeback to competitive skating before we did not feel like coming back or_ not _coming back were both equally fulfilling choices. We did not want to come back because we felt like we couldn’t hack it in the real world. Once we found that we could in fact hack it if we wanted, we sat down together and made a choice. That choice was to have two more years of intense focus and training and go for another Olympic Gold—but to do it right this time. To really strive for a proper balance between work and life and between our relationship and outside relationships. We did great on the first goal and failed abysmally at the latter. But you can’t have it all. Balancing Tessa-and-Scott with the rest of the world took us a while into actually being together in our romantic relationship—because the getting there had occupied a lot of our focus in the almost two decades that it took, which in turn had taken the focus off of those outside relationships more than we had maybe realised ourselves._

 

_[…]_

_Whether you are trying to balance your work and your life or your relationship and your life, there are different strategies and exercises you can try and achieve your goal. This chapter is supposed to give you a couple of real-life, actually applicable ideas. I want to tell you how I did it. Even if I’m still not done by any stretch of the imagination. Still, I had a lot of balancing and growing to do, so I can tell you what I have tried and what has worked for me. So let’s not waste time, it’s never too early to find balance._

 

* * *

 

 

In trying to achieve balance in her work and private life with a baby and a toddler at home, Tessa had to prioritise. She had three major avenues of work that she had put on hold over the last three weeks of her pregnancy and two months after giving birth but which soon enough needed her attention again.But she could only do so much. Which meant that certain things had to take the back burner (her writing career being one of them). 

 

This left the clothing line, speaking engagements (with and without her husband), her partnership deals and her charity. Her charity would require the most hands-on-work while the clothing line was in dire need of organising a restock and her partnership deals mostly needed her to be active on Instagram and show her face at events. The speaking engagement are few and far in between so she barely has to have a mind for those. And Tessa being Tessa, she opted to put her back into where she was needed most. She scheduled three photoshoots five months into the future (enough to get her figure back) and gave a couple of phoner interviews over breakfast and that was it for the partners. Then she put her mother in charge of the fashion line and put her small staff in Montreal as well as herself back to the important work: the charity. 

 

For the first month of that, everything went swimmingly. If you don’t count the fact that she barely slept, she really got through everything exceptionally well. Still, that lasts exactly the four weeks that Scott is still home with her. After Mia’s birth, he had put in for three months off with Patch and if they tag-teamed it, Tessa could easily slip off to her office on the first floor of their house, get six to  seven hours of work a day in and only break to nurse Mia when Scott brought her over from the living room, Bellamy waddling after him on steadier feet by the day. It was all going swell. She felt on top of the earth, really. There was a calm in her teamwork with Scott, a trained ease about passing off duties and improvising on the fly. You don’t work with someone for twenty plus years and don’t get into a certain flow. 

 

Tessa was the one who did scheduling, who worked their few public duties in with the myriad of things they had to do around the house. Who took the kids to the doctor check-ups, who went grocery shopping, what supplies they were short on and the like. Scott cooked and played with the kids when she had some organising to do, for the charity or whatever else was on the plate. She was settled in this, at ease. Yes, having two children instead of one ups the ante on everything by roughly a thousand and she would be lying if she said she wasn’t terrified to be messing everything up half the time but that can’t be helped. The truth is she worried about everything, about what toys to get for Bellamy that would be both educational and fun (but without plastic if it could be avoided), about the milestones he had passed way earlier than Mia (he had sat up and rolled over at a point in time when Mia hadn’t felt even remotely inclined to yet). Half the time she was convinced that she was a terrible mother but then again Scott was so natural and so fantastic with the kids that she found her balance about parenting in that.

 

The day Scott went back to work, however, was the day Tessa realised that being a working-from-home-Mom of two on her own wasn’t the cake walk she had expected it to be. With Bellamy by himself, it had always been so easy, he’d just lounged in a corner and watched her, undemanding and happy to just be on the sidelines observing. But suddenly she had two kids in her workspace (plus the cat) and Mia was so much more fussy than Bell had ever been. She demanded constant attention and was too active to just be set aside to watch the office bustle. Meanwhile Bellamy was taking apart his play pen, being annoyed that he couldn’t move about the office like he now wanted, seeing that his sister was in the thick of the fun. It was just that by now he was walking so fast, he couldn’t be left to roam anymore or he would simply wander off.

 

Two months into this, Mia has grown plump and loud and Bellamy would do better on a leash, actually. For some blessed two hours each day, Tessa’s daughter sleeps on the floor in the play pen and Bellamy naps along with her for solidarity. That’s the only time Tessa gets some actual work done. The rest of it, she is either feeding Mia or bouncing her on her lap to keep from crying while pleading with a toddler to please settle down, who yells mostly unintelligible things back in reply, the clearest vocabulary being things like “no” and “Momma” and “Bell ou’!”. It’s a lot. No way around it and all in all Tessa thinks she’s doing alright but she can’t help feeling a little bit out of her depth here and there. And kind of struggling with the two sides of her life, the motherhood and the entrepreneurial side that literally intersect in a two-room winter garden office at the back of her house. Meanwhile Scott is continuing his steep way to the top of Canada’s skating coaches elite, with two junior teams doing better than expected literally every single competition. 

 

And she’s happy for him, she really is but she kind of misses the days when he was there all the time. When they had this team work thing going on. When the having kids part was kind of like the skating part had been, just Tessa-and-Scott working things out. Now it was Tessa and the kids and the office and Scott and his teams and the rink. Two separate days, converging at their respective ends and there never seems to be enough time for anything other than recapitulating and going to sleep. (And Scott trying desperately to see his kids a little while they’re still awake.) Such is life, sure. But she still misses her husband. And most of all her best friend. If you’re used to being with someone nearly 24/7 for the better part of two decades, suddenly leading different lives, even if you’re married, is kind of weird. Alas, they have chosen this. And they aren’t so ridiculously rich that they could just tap out and dedicate their lives to raising a hockey team worth of children. They still have to work, so here they are.

 

It’s nine in the morning a little after Mia has turned five months when Tessa’s three employees get in one by one as they usually do, greeting her with the big grins of people that have gotten more than two hours of sleep that night and she hates them all a little bit for it. Connor is the first one in. He’s twenty-six and one of the best dressed men she has ever seen. This morning, his wide hipster hat barely fits through the garden-faced door they are using as the office’s own entrance. He greets her with a peck on the cheek and takes Mia from her arms with her daughter already straining to get to him with her chubby little arms. (She is obsessed with him, mostly because she seems to be fascinated by his voluminous blonde hair that is such an interesting change from the mop on her father’s head).

“Fine, go to your boyfriend,” Tessa sighs as soon as Mia cuddles herself against Connor’s slim frame, chuckling and pulling at his scruffy chin.

 

“Oh, honey, I have such bad news for you,” Connor pipes at the child and kisses her head lightly. “It’s a good thing she’s a baby and I don’t have to break her heart.”

“If she wasn’t a baby, she’d know you were gay,” Tessa deadpans, because _honestly._

“Good point,” Connor concedes on a chuckle and carries Mia over to his desk, keeping her on his lap as he fires up his computer. The next time he looks up is when Trudy gets in. 

 

She’s their intern, twenty-four years old and endlessly enthusiastic. She is the most smiley, happy girl Tessa has met in a long time, probably since the gaggles of tiny Russian skaters on tour in Asia, so happy to get a month away from their near oppressive coaches they practically walked backwards from it. Trudy’s been with them for two months and without her keeping the office stocked and all the spreadsheets up to date, Tessa could have packed up the place and called it quits already. She gives the girl a swift hug good morning and they prepare the coffee for the update meeting the way they always do. Once the pot is brewing, Claudia gets in. The forty-year-old is solely in charge of the charity, while Connor and Trudy also handle the fashion line and general scheduling. Claudia tugs her hair back behind her ears and sets up the conference table under Bellamy’s watchful eye. Her red dyed hair needs a touch up at the roots but right now things are crazy and neither of them really has time to worry about salon appointments. 

 

At nine fifteen all of them, plus the kids on Connor’s and Tessa’s laps, sit around the white, round, delicate conference table and listen to Claudia lay down the agenda of the week.  

“So that is on Friday,” she says eventually. “Which means we have to get the feedback by Thursday at the latest. And regarding today, I know I said I was going to go with Tessa to the school keynote but I really need to crack down on the workshops for next week, so it would be really great if someone else could go.”

“I’ll do it,” Connor says. 

“And we’ll take the kids, so you guys can get some work done,” Tessa nods. If Connor is there, she doesn’t need to worry about Mia. Just Bell who she’s going to have to keep occupied while she gives her speech.

 

Tessa has been doing these little visits to schools, colleges and rinks for a while now, sometimes to do workshops, sometimes to give a keynote speech, sometimes to introduce her charity and what it can do for girls looking to breech into professional sport and/or performing arts. It’s good work, great even but it’s also a lot of travel. Most of the time she only brings one of the kids because sometimes it’s four hour drives or even flights to their destinations and that is a lot to coordinate with two kids. Today, though, it’s a school in Montreal so it’s just half an hour into town and that’s perfectly doable with both of them, especially with Connor on board who is a natural. (He usually stays behind with Bellamy when Tessa is gone for the entire day and she is ever so grateful for that because “Babysitter” had probably not been a thing he had expected to be when she’d put up the job offer for a project manager for her clothing line.) 

 

Alas, here they are and they’re making it work. Once everyone is back at their desks, Tessa sets out to load their sparkling new mini-van with everything they need for her speech (a tiny beamer and her laptop plus leaflets and flyers) as well as everything her kids require on a trip (diapers, bottles of water and mashed potatoes for Bell and pumped milk for Mia, blankets and stuffed animals to keep them entertained). Once she is done, she waves through the windows for Connor to bring Mia out and strap her into the car seat while she collects Bellamy from the pen. he waves at her colleagues as he has started to lately and yelps a soft: “Bye bye” which Trudy and Claudia echo.

“If anyone calls, you can patch them through to my cell until eleven,” Tessa tells them and is out the door, joining Connor who has already sat down at the wheel, Mia playing with her feet on the car seat behind him. Bell is strapped in minutes later and then they’re already on the road, the speakers in the car blaring children songs that Tessa knows by heart. (Scott does too, but he also sings along enthusiastically when they’re driving, something Connor gladly doesn’t do.)

 

Upon their arrival at the school, Mia has dropped off and doesn’t wake up when Tessa takes the car seat out and follows Connor inside, her son leading her colleague by the hand as fast as his little legs carry him. They’re met at the door by a lady who introduces herself as Sharon and Tessa holds out her free hand to shake. “You’ve spoked to Claudia, right?” Tessa asks her.

“Exactly,” Sharon nods and smiles kindly. “We got the girls in the auditorium, everyone’s so excited already.”

“Me too,” Tessa says. “I’m going to have the kids in the back with Connor here, I hope that’s alright.”

 

“Of course,” Sharon hurries. “Anything you need for them?”

Tessa declines politely and their little gang processes to the auditorium where a group of around fifty girls is sitting in the first couple of rows, giggling and chatting until they realise that Tessa has entered the room. Then it’s sudden silence and all eyes on her. And her kids. It takes about four seconds for the first phone to be raised and Tessa smiles brightly, a trained motion at this point.

“Hi girls,” she starts, walking to the stage, handing over the car seat with her sleeping daughter to Connor who know has both her kids in his care. “I’m so happy to be here! I’m going to talk a little bit about life as a working Mom a little later…but as you can see one aspect of it is that sometimes I’m bringing my kids along to these talks. But since they’ve not asked to be here per se, I would really appreciate it if you did not take pictures of them. D’you think we can agree on that? If you all like, we can take pictures together at the end of the talk—but if you could, I’d be very grateful if you kept the cameras on just me. Yeah?”

 

For the most part people these days respect her privacy, all the more if she is out with her children but there are more than enough pictures circulating through the internet of people who have snuck glimpses of Bell and Mia, be that at an Ilderton carnival or skating competitions Scott attended with one of his Gadbois’ teams and Tessa brought the kids to watch. She knows it won’t be helped, not as long as they still have some notoriety in Canada but she can at least try and appeal to people to keep her toddlers out of the public eye. Some days it works better, some days it works less well. She hopes today, her kids faces won’t end up on instagram. 

 

By the time the girls at least all nod and affirm their accord (and the one with the raised phone puts it down with a guilty look on her face), Tessa has reached the stage and sits down on the chair prepared for her there. She straightens her spine, letting her eyes wander across her audience and Bellamy, who’s climbing onto a seat in the first row that the girls have left collectively empty and then meets Conner’s eye as he gives her a thumbs up about the laptop and beamer he is setting up. 

“So, I’d like to talk to you today about growing up a girl in the world of competitive sport,” Tessa starts and turns her attention towards the greater room. “You’re here at this school either in a  high tier sport’s program or a performance art program, right? So you are very used to high expectations and a lot of hard work.”

 

She waits for the girls to signal their agreement and then continues, starting at the top of her speech as Connor thumbs through the slides. She begins with her childhood, talking a lot about skating and school and what it means to be a girl in sport and growing up with all the pressure attached to it. By the time she gets to Worlds 2007 and how after, her legs had started hurting, Bellamy gets bored of sitting on the plush auditorium seat and starts talking at her. There’s a couple of laughs first but when he doesn’t stop blubbering, Tessa gets up and has Connor lift her son up the stage and finishes the rest of the speech bouncing him on her lap, trying to engage him by giving him her chiffon scarf to play with. It’s very fitting when she gets to the point about working and being a Mom, a fact perfectly illustrated by her child in her arms, pulling at the scarf and her long hair in turn. 

 

“The first year with a kid, I was very lucky to have a husband who was completely involved. He took half a year off so we could tag-team it and that also made it possible for me to start working again when Bellamy was three months old,” she says, smoothing out Bell’s little t-shirt as he climbs onto his full feet on her lap and fiddles with her cardigan where it sits on her shoulder. “I am working out of home, which helped a great deal with this too. I could get a lot of work done at my laptop from my office or my living room while being around my kid and my husband, having a work life and a family life in such close proximity. Then when Scott went back to work—and he does have to step out of the house to do that—Bellamy was old enough to just…we like to say… _chill out_ at the office with me. Whenever I had to travel, I either took him with me or left him with his Dad who would just take him to the rink with him. It worked well for us and we decided to have another baby. Mia was born five months ago and so far, we have done it pretty much the way we have with our son. But obviously having two children is more of a logistical effort than having one and this time around, my husband could only take three months off. Mind you, not all jobs even allow for that time away from work for Moms or Dads and that is a challenge. How many of you want to have a family someday in the future?”

 

Out of the fifty girls in the audience, about two-thirds raise their arm up high and Tessa nods. “If that is something you want to do in your life, you have to be prepared to make lots and lots of compromises. But it’s also a wonderful gift. Getting to raise your own family, ideally with someone you love, is great. It takes a lot out of you but it also gives so much back. It’s important to look for a balance there too, though. It’s important that you remember that you’re not just a Mom, same as it is with the being not just an athlete or a performer. That’s constant work but it’s worth it.”

 

She tells them about her mantras, what she does when it seems like her entire existence boils down to changing diapers and bouncing babies, and in the end of it, she opens the floor to a Q&A. But a couple of questions in, something unexpected happens that has her grip her son tight on her lap, trying hard to control both her feelings and her features.

“I have a question,” is how it starts, small and innocuous, said by a freckled, blonde girl in the third row on a small voice. “If something bad has happened and people don’t believe you because you’re a girl, what do you do?”

“What do you mean, sweetie?” Tessa asks, shifting Bellamy on her lap so he stops flopping around. “Who doesn’t believe you because you’re a girl?” 

The girl, she must be about fourteen, shifts in her seat uncomfortably, turns to her friend beside her who nods encouragingly and nudges her to speak. “They’re saying I got it wrong. Because I don’t understand that guys are just flirty. And he’s so good at hockey, they can’t afford to kick him off the team.”

“What exactly happened?” Tessa asks, growing alert and sitting up straighter. This doesn’t sound too good. 

“It was at the rink after practice,” the girl says. “I’m doing synchronised skating, he’s on the Hockey team. He didn’t do anything…like, _really_ bad. But he touched me and I didn’t want it and then I told my coach about it and they all said I was exaggerating and boys will be boys and stuff. And nothing was done about it at all. They’re just covering it up now.”

 

“That is…that’s,” Tessa starts and quickly finds herself swimming. She glances over at Sharon who has taken a couple of steps toward the rows of seats and frowns. But she doesn’t say anything, so Tessa has to keep going. “That’s unfortunate. And that shouldn’t happen. And you say you have talked to your coach about this?” The girl nods. “Well, your coach is responsible for your well being at the rink and should be taking this seriously, especially if it affects you feeling safe and protected within your sport.”

“I don’t feel protected,” the girl says and Tessa feels tears prickling at the edge of her vision which she quickly swallows down. She’s heard these stories so many times by now but they still hit her squarely in the chest every time. It’s just not right. Girls should be allowed to live their dreams undisturbed from abuse in any which way or silenced when they speak out if it still happened.

“But you should,” Tessa says resolutely. “Let’s talk some more at the end of this and see if we can work something out.”

 

Tessa can’t do much and she doesn’t flatter herself thinking that she can. At most, she can disperse some of her funds in the pot for legal counsel. But then again if it was a minor case like the girl says then probably the funds simply won't go to help her case due to the lack of severity. (And isn’t that the most terrible thing? That she is running a charity that helps people with lawyers and lawsuit fees but only if they went through hell? That she has to say, ‘no sorry, we don’t have enough’ to most people who ask them for help?) In the end, after Tessa has stayed a half-hour past the allotted time talking to the freckled girl and her braver friend in private, she has given out her card and vowed to have Claudia look into it if the girl decides to rattle some cages about what has happened again. But it isn’t a declaration of war, not even a promise to fight for her. She can’t do more than assure her that they will have a deeper look at the situation and that doesn’t feel right.

 

She carries that all the way home with her, all the way through her time spent scheduling her other talks for the months around Scott’s competition season (with limited success), all the way through her break and some phone calls about her clothing line as well as interviewing a potential new book-keeper for the charity. And all the way through to the time her employees leave and she feeds her kids, waiting for her husband to come home. She has put down Bellamy at seven, ten minutes after Scott texted that he was running late and by the time he gets in, she is sitting on the couch, Mia propped up on her chest and nursing pillow, trying to get her daring daughter to properly feed instead of just staring into blankness with her mouth ajar.

“Come on, baby, you’re not that tired,” Tessa pleads with her as the key turns in the lock of the front door and Scott walks in in his heavy winter boots, shaking the fresh snow that has started to fall just half an hour ago off of his coat as he puts it on the hanger.

 

“I’ll get that in a second,” he announces, pointing at the quickly melting white stuff on the floor and doesn’t bother with hello. “How’s it going?”

“Uh, the usual. Mia’s being difficult about eating again,” Tessa replies just when her daughter does remember how nursing works and Tessa winces at the sharp pain as her daughter’s mouth clamps around her nipple like a tiny monster-piranha’s. Scott shoots her a look where he stands in the hallways and bows down to clean up the puddle of melted snow with his scarf (typical) and slips out of his shoes. 

“Still painful?” He asks over and she nods.

“How was your day?” Tessa asks, trying to get her face smooth so as to not worry him.

“I hate kids,” Scott says exasperatedly and she knows he doesn’t mean it which is why she laughs and holds out the one arm for him that is not supporting their daughter. He follows as if pulled on a string.

 

He still smells like the rink when he flops down on the couch beside her, tugs himself against her side and ducks down to kiss Mia softly on the head and then his wife on the lips. She missed him so much. He tastes like coffee.

“Caffeine after seven?” Tessa inquires because he usually avoids that, as electric as he usually is, coffee past four in the afternoon mostly isn’t Scott Moir’s sleep pattern’s friend.

“Don’t even ask,” he groans and lets his forehead fall onto her shoulder. “These children are killing me. I’m so tired, T.”

“I had a crap day, too,” Tessa sighs and Scott perks up immediately, scooting closer and nudging the side of her face with his like a cat before kissing her cheek.

“What happened, babe?” He asks and she answers him after another suppressed whine from how hard Mia is sucking now that she has regained her memory of how to do it.

“We were at this school for a talk and in the Q and A a girl told us about how she was groped by a hockey player at her rink and instead of her coach taking action, they basically told her she was making drama for nothing and swept the whole thing under the rug because the guy who did it is such a big shot in the team that they don’t want to lose him,” Tessa recounts pensively. “And there’s not really anything we can do. She doesn’t want to press charges or anything but she doesn’t feel safe at her rink anymore and that’s just…that’s exactly the kind of thing we want to work towards not happening but there’s too little wiggle room. Makes me feel useless. And I can’t think of anything else and I didn’t get anything done today, really. And there I sit going on and on about work-life-balance and nothing feels balanced at all.”

 

“Sweetie,” Scott hums and kisses the side of her face again. “You’ll figure something out, you always do. And I’ll say you’re doing pretty fine. I mean, come on, you’re rocking this charity, you’re really making a difference for those young girls you’re meeting and you’re doing all of it with two kids on your hands.”

“I’m not really changing anything, though,” she argues.

“You’re not gonna change an entire culture of protecting assholes because they’re good at sports in a day and by yourself,” Scott tells her and she huffs.

“That’s a great way to go about it,” she says. “So I’ll just do nothing?”

“Not what I said,” he  counters. “You’re doing your best. But you gotta stop expecting to change the whole world by yourself.” Instead of answering, she just glares at him. “Don’t look at me like that, Tess. It’s not unreasonable what I said.”

“Yeah, but where does that leave me?” She asks. “This shouldn’t be the state of the world. I should be able to do something about it. I’m just…I feel like I’m yelling into the void constantly. I got nothing to show for my work. I can’t help this girl at all.”

“Yeah, you can,” Scott insists. “You can raise awareness. You can make a post about it or, hell,  I don’t know, make a line of t-shirts with quotes or whatever and use the money for more workshops. You can do anything.”

 

Tessa sighs and she wants to say something more but then Mia coughs and yelps and she has to move her to her other breast. Scott watches, helps holding Mia’s head and then runs his hand softly over his daughter’s head when she continues to nurse. “Is there some food left?” He asks.

“In the fridge,” Tessa tells him and then he’s already jumped into action. Tessa watches him move about, rummaging around the kitchen and pacing back and forth once he’s put the plate in the microwave. 

“I’m gonna put her to bed,” she tells him once he’s settled in to eat and he nods, blowing them both a kiss. He’s still eating when Tessa comes back and joins him at the table. 

“This is really bugging you, eh?” He asks, mouth still full and puts his fork down so he can reach for her hand on the wooden surface.

 

“I’m restless and I feel like I’m dragging my feet,” Tessa says, which is the absolute truth.

“You’re doing good,” he reassures her. “It’ll all be alright.”

She wants to believe him but she feels hollow. The moment that morning is still stuck in her head, the look on that girl’s face that was expecting some wisdom or help of her that she just couldn’t give. Nothing she could offer right now was enough. And Scott is right, she could do things to raise awareness and she is going to but there are so many things she just _can’t_ do. Scott is right, she can’t change a grown system of downplaying abusive behaviour in sports, can’t do much to help in the situation that has presented itself today, can’t even really sit anywhere and preach about work-life-balance when she isn’t able to even figure out if she has that in her own life or if both those concepts are as intertwined as they have always been for her. And that doesn’t feel good. She feels like a phoney, like a liar almost and Scott is too much of an optimist to fully get why this bothers her so much.

 

He will just keep being super supportive and bless his soul for that but he doesn’t understand why she sees a pit in front of her instead of a hill to climb and get somewhere. She just sees a cliff in front of her and below a shadowy valley she doesn’t know how to cross. 

“I know that look,” Scott muses, squeezing her hand. “You’re going to the dark place.”

“I’m just tired,” she says because if she brings up her doubts and worries again, they’ll just go in circles, him talking her up and her being unconvinced that anything she ever did in her life was any good.

“Then let’s go to bed,” he smiles and releases her hand to take his plate and load it into the dishwasher, returning to the table with his arm outstretched to lead her away from the living room and up the stairs to their bedroom. They brush their teeth side by side, change into their pyjamas side by side and climb into bed side by side. He looks at her softly as their heads hit the pillows and pushes her hair out of her forehead after a moment.

 

“I wish I could get into that head of yours and make you see what I see,” he murmurs.

“Me too,” she whispers back and breathes a couple of deep breaths with him as he runs his hand heavy down her arm, grounding her.

“I got Mia tonight,” he says once he reaches across her body to the bedside table to kill the lamp and her eyes take a solid minute to adjust to the darkness and make out his features getting closer to hers. She anticipates the kiss but not how passionate it is. On instinct, she sinks into it, falling into his proximity like gravity, like she always does and her body lights up from her lips down to her toes and she’s ready when he deepens the kiss, sweeping his tongue across her lips. She nuzzles closer to him, her hands twisting into his hair but then the pace of his touches shift. He kisses her closed lipped first and chaste next and his wandering hand comes back to her face, cupping her cheek before he finally leans out again, smiling.

“It’s late and I’m toast,” he says under his breath, not even apologetically, just matter-of-factly. (Their sex-life has reached that level of long-running relationships where you can just say no if you don't feel like it and it's not a big deal. And it's _not_ a big deal.) “Let’s get some sleep, huh?”

 

She nods, accepting, and forces her heart to beat normally again. It’s not smart to have sex now anyway. Even if Scott gets up when Mia wakes up every three hours that night, Tessa’s a restless sleeper and will wake up anyway. They both have early mornings. No, it’s better this way. No matter how much she wants him…how much she craves his touch to calm her down. He’s right to want to sleep. She should too. So she smiles and kisses him back quickly when he pecks her lips good night one more time and then turns around, his broad back to her like a wall.

“I love you,” he says to the other side of the room.

“I love you, too,” she echoes and means it. And tries very, very hard to convince herself that she doesn’t feel a little bit alone for the very first time in a bed with him. It’s not like she can’t use the rest either but she had kind of wanted…she had _wanted_. And now it isn’t happening. She understands him though, can’t fault him. It’s a work night and they are both so so busy. And he has the absolute right to not be in the mood. He get's to say no, too. That's well within his rights and it's not a big deal. It doesn't mean he's not into her any more. It doesn't mean he's getting bored after all. He loves her, he's always there at the end of the day. Even if it's just for an hour or two. He's always trying so hard to be the best for her. He really, really does.

 

So it’s not him. It’s not _them_ even. It’s her. She can’t quite put her finger on it either, doesn’t know what it is…but it's there, lurking in the back of her mind. Something unsettling, something that makes her chest feel tight and fluttery all at once. And Tessa Virtue doesn’t feel balanced, doesn’t feel balanced at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Very excited to hear your thoughts!


	3. Adversity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's gotta get worse before it gets better.
> 
> Thank you for your patience <3

_**Chapter Two: Adversity** _

 

_I guess it is hardly a reveal that the most adversity I experienced in my private life was with Scott. And that includes both adversity which we faced together in our sport on a regular basis and the adversity we occasionally felt regarding each other. In a 25+ year relationship that is and was at times any of the following three things in separation and combination: friendship, romance, business partnership (and later parenthood)—there aren’t very many things you don’t feel or experience with each other. No single person in the world knows me as well as Scott does, not even my own mother. Nobody else can make me laugh quite as hard, make me want to sing in public so much or helps me feel at home in my bones like he can. But at the same time, no-one else can make me as furious. Nobody else on the planet has the ability to drive me up the wall the way he does or as fast as he does._

 

 _The loudest and hardest I have ever argued in my life was with Scott. And while we were very conscious of never blaming or name-calling each other on the ice, we weren’t always as disciplined about that off of it. Luckily we have seen our fair share of couple’s therapists who helped us develop methods to appreciate each other’s points of view. We are very different styles when it comes to processing and articulating conflicts and it’s a lot of work to this day to start the difficult conversations that you just need to have sometimes if you want a relationship,_ any _relationship, to work. For us this meant seeking professional help from a very early age. We started seeing a marriage counsellor before I even turned twenty._

 

 _Back at that point, our professional partnership was on the verge of breaking apart because we had been careless with our personal one. We have since spoken a lot about the time when it happened, that rift between us at the heels of the first surgery on my shins —adversity as well, and of a kind I will get to later in this chapter— that was caused by a severe lack of communication. This is all true. We did not really talk to each other during my two-month recovery and it caused our relationship to very nearly disintegrate. But what we never disclosed was that the lack of communication did not really stem from either of us feeling overly guilty about being healthy or not being healthy in turn, but from the fact that we did not know how to deal with the fact that before the surgery we had crossed the boundaries of our previously platonic, sibling-like friendship into the territory of lovers. And I guess_ this _is the part with the reveal._

 

 _We never discussed this publicly for obvious reasons. First and foremost, we did not want our personal, physical relationship broadcasted or used in any which way, may that be for profit or ammunition to tear us down. We also did not want the fact that we had been intimate to become known in our sport and potentially interfere with the way our skating was being perceived and judged. But most of all, we were steadfastly deluding ourselves into thinking that we could keep it all a secret between just the two of us and thus could sustain a work environment in which_ only _the two of us had to deal with the fallout and not bother anyone else with it._

 

 _Which failed spectacularly, as you might be able to imagine. This was why we were sent to therapy in the first place, because we could not handle the situation on our own and we were starting to drag others, namely our coaches, into the murky realms of teenage angst with us. So eventually they had enough and there we sat in our first therapy session, two kids at nineteen and twenty-one, desperately in love with each other beneath all of it (I don’t believe we ever truly fell_ out _of love after those teenage years), but full of resentment at the same time. We loved each other, yes, but we did not like each other very much then. It was one of the hardest times in my life. Coincidentally, the hardest times of my life were always those times that Scott and I did not get along._

 

_He said once that when we fight, it’s crippling and that is true. I don’t function when we fight. Balance in my life has always also meant balance with Scott. If he and I aren’t good, everything else is askew too. He is my even keel, my level. Running into problems with him is like hitting a wall. Adversity regarding him makes all other adversity pale in comparison. But what techniques and lessons I have learned in regards to overcoming that, have come in handy all the other times I met struggle and hardship in my life._

 

 _The most important step to begin this chapter in earnest is step one for any of the following techniques_ and _the one prerequisite to meet to have just the_ chance _of success is: Recognise the situation. Don’t run away from it, don’t shrink in front of the adversity you’re facing. You feel it anyway, you know it’s there. Don’t hide, it’s useless. It’s coming for you at the end of the day…it’s best to face it head on. And not act like it isn’t there. It’s a lesson still have to get better at learning._

 

* * *

 

Tessa does not have problems. Not really. And Tessa and Scott definitely don’t have problems. It’s just a difficult phase. Growing pains, so to speak. Bellamy has just hit the terrible two’s hard and Mia is collicky. So that sucks, plain and simple. Scott can’t really help so much because the ‘23/‘24 season is kicking into high gear and he has to be at the rink with his teams into the wee hours of the night most of the time, which means that she is pretty much left to her own devices at home for the majority of the day. It also means that they don’t really...well, they don’t have time to get _intimate_ and she’s missing it a little bit.

 

But it’s fine. It’s normal. She doesn’t mind too much, honestly. That stuff changes when you have kids. Especially when you have two of them. And two careers that demand a lot from the parents. Which is not to say that it feels a lot like Tessa has that intense of a career right now. It’s more like she’s pretending to be a business woman while trying to talk Bellamy from flinging himself off of any second chair he climbs on for sheer dramatics and make sure Mia is not running a deadly fever every other day. That, as well as some other things, have made it necessary for Tessa to send her employees off to work from home at one in the afternoon one day in early December because Mia had started puking and Bellamy had, in turn, not stopped to yell his little head off about _things._ He’s not really intelligible at the moment. So she had a pretty shitty day so far and it’s nobody’s fault. Scott, who gets home comparatively early (at eight PM), does not deserve her crappy mood and so she tries to stay away from him. To just be annoyed and cranky on her own so as to not bother him with it and not get annoyed with him for silly reasons, which is a battle she loses occasionally lately. (She doesn’t like that about herself at all and she’s trying to be better about it!)

 

“How’s your day been?” Scott asks casually as soon as he has walked into the door, like a line from a script. One of his usual variants of ‘Honey, I’m home’. And Tessa knows by the way she tenses up from his happy-go-lucky tone that she needs to get away and to bed soon, so she doesn’t get irrationally angry about nothing and get prissy with him about his chipperness for no reason.

“Long,” she answers merely, her eyes clunky from exhaustion, and walks to him to put Bell from her hips onto his. Their little boy gurgles something mumbly about legos and finishes it with “Daddy, bed” to which Scott nods enthusiastically.

“Yeah, Daddy’s gonna put you to bed,” he coos at Bellamy and Tessa does her best not to scoff, chastising herself instantly for the impulse. ( _Just one of them that’s gonna be put to bed by Daddy tonight_ , her brain thinks at her, not being particularly helpful.)

 

“That’s it? Long?” Scott asks her, shifting Bell to his left side so he can draw her in with his right arm and kiss her on the corner of her mouth. “That’s all I’m getting?”

“I’m tired, babe,” she tells him. She’s so tired of everything today, she’s tired to death about how it feels like she hasn’t moved an inch in months, like she’s stuck in tar and she doesn’t know why. “It was the same as everyday, screaming kids and paperwork. I just really want to sleep.” And since he’s made it very clear before he left in the morning that he has about ten hours of new competition music hopefuls for next season to go through within the next week, it’s a given he won’t be going to bed with _her._ So why wait up? In the end, he’ll be too exhausted to do anything anyway. “Dinner’s in the fridge. I’m turning in.”

 

“I love you,” he tells her, raising a quizzical eyebrow. He knows something is up. He’s known for a good month now but she can’t find it in herself to put him at ease. Not right now. Everything is fine, just a little difficult at the moment and she doesn’t need to bother him with it. It’s not important. She’ll get over it.

“Love you too,” she says and tries for a reassuring smile but she can feel that it’s not reaching her eyes, so she grins, wider and wills it to be real. They’re fine. It’s _fine._

 

As she walks around the house a few minutes later, putting stuff away left and right on her snail trail to the bedroom (how are her children so tiny and still manage to put the whole place into complete disarray every single day?!), she catches glimpses of Scott with the kids whenever she passes the hallway that looks into the living room. He puts Bellamy down on the blanket that Mia lies on on her belly, hiccuping happily when he’s close enough for her baby eyes to get her Dad into focus.

 

Next time Tessa walks past (a giant pile of laundry from the dryer in a basket she can’t be bothered to fold tonight), it’s Scott who’s on the floor. Bell is sitting next to his head grabbing fistfuls of his long locks between his pudgy fingers while Scott holds Mia high up in the air, making her fly and laugh cheerily. The next time, when Tessa has to come back down from the first floor because she forgot to set the coffee maker for the next morning, Scott has moved the kids to the couch where both of them are sitting on his lap, quiet, obedient and happy to listen to his rumbling voice read them _Where The Wild Things Are._

 

It’s beautiful. Alright? He’s a great father and their kids adore him. He makes time where he possibly can and he is devoted and attentive and he loves them so much, she doesn’t think he’s ever loved anything quite like that, possibly not even her. It’s a beautiful sight and the best father she could hope for for her children. But seeing him like that with their angel babies on the couch, she just gets angry. Like she knew she was going to, like she’s trying so hard not to be. It’s because she’s tired and annoyed and she hasn’t slept right in days and because, well, this day happened and he wasn’t there for it and sometimes it seems he’s never there for those anymore and it’s so frustrating to watch her kids be so fucking well-behaved for him when they’ve wrecked her nerves all day.

 

(And she loves her kids, God knows, she loves them so much she could cry but they’re also so much to handle these days and sometimes she does cry but not for love but because she doesn’t know how to do it all...how to make sure that she is doing right by her kids or if she’s just a terrible mother who can’t do anything right while Scott has that Midas touch with them that just makes everything he does look so effortlessly flawless. Like the skating had always been for him...just intuitively perfect all the time.)

 

It’s so frustrating, both to witness it and finding herself unable to not get ticked off about it, she can’t stick around to watch anymore, so the last thing she sees before she turns on her heels and stalks upstairs to their bedroom is another smile from Scott as he pauses reading the story and him nodding to her, saying into Bell’s hair: “Say night to Momma.”

“Ni’ Momma,” Bellamy parrots and Tessa manages a smile. That’s all. She loves them all so much but she doesn’t really like them so much at the moment.

“I’ll eat you up, I love you so,” Scott says as she climbs up the stairs to their bedroom, wanting to sleep for a million years.

 

She wakes up but only a little when Scott climbs into bed with her what feels like hours later. He cuddles close to her back, spooning her and there’s the ghost of his lips on the back of her neck like every night as she hears him whisper softly: “Goodnight, baby.” She grumbles in return and tugs him closer until they click into place, back to front, flush and snug and she feels him press against her ass but nothing more comes of it and she’s too tired anyway. Before she can talk herself into forgoing sleep in order to seduce him a little, she’s dropped off again. By the time she wakes to her alarm in the morning, he’s already making noise downstairs.

 

He’s moved Bell and Mia into the playpen and is just clearing the kitchen table from his breakfast. And he left a plate for her and the cucumber, cream cheese and pop rice bread that she has in the mornings, which is very sweet and considerate. But it’s too early in the morning to really appreciate it. He is also just a pinch too cheerful and the kids are already screaming. Not that he seems to care, what with how chipper he just talks back at them. She walks into the room to Scott arguing with Bell about nonsense and he grins when he sees her, crossing the distance to her to wrap her in his arms, nuzzling her briefly.

 

“Coffee is done and waiting,” he tells her, not that she couldn’t smell it. He’s not surprised when she doesn’t answer. Such is her way in the AM. “I’ll be off a little earlier tonight. I’ll try to be back by five thirty, hopefully.”

She nods, attempting a smile, and then he leaves her to get ready to head out. Tessa eats her rice puff bread while he thrashes through the hallway like a berserker looking for his stuff that she has moved out of the way last night (since he did not put it away to where it belongs).

“Cupboard,” she calls out to him after taking a sip from her first god-sent mug of coffee. “Like always.” She adds, muttering under her breath, but he doesn’t hear that.

 

He rumbles on and as soon as he has turned the corner, Mia starts complaining. Tessa is out of her seat in an instant because she knows those kinds of whines that Mia starts making end up in screeching because she is hungry. She acts fast and routinely, plucking her daughter from the playpen and carrying her over to the couch. It’s a second too late that she notices that she’s completely forgotten to get the bib and Mia is already sucking away (for once actually willing to without having to be coaxed) and now Tessa can’t move if she wants to make sure Mia keeps at it.

 

“Baby, can you get one of Mia’s bibs from the dryer?” She calls out to the cluttering in the hall.

“I’m kind of on the run,” Scott calls back, not even showing his face.

“Scott, could you please just get it?” She asks, trying to not sound as immediately ticked off as she is. “It takes _five_ seconds.”

“I’m already running late,” Scott whines and sounds a little like his daughter had a minute ago. “I have my shoes on.”

“Then keep them the eff on,” Tessa semi-curses which should tell him that she is not kidding around. “Please. Just _get_ the bib.”

 

From the hall comes a puff of exasperation and Scott huffs: “Fine”, trudges away and then walks into the living room with his shoes on and puts the bib over her baby-free shoulder. “There,” he says, like he’s just made a grave sacrifice for his family.

“Thank you,” Tessa snips and redjusts Mia’s weight on her.

Meanwhile Scott strides over to the playpen, kisses Bellamy on his head of black hair, then walks back to the couch to kiss Mia.

“See you later,” he says on a smile. And Tessa does not get a kiss.

“Great,” she mutters as the front door falls shut after him and winces when Mia sucks at her breast harder than before as it starts running empty. “See you later.”

 

She doesn’t have problems, like with her life or her marriage or anything. She is damn lucky. Her kids are beautiful and her husband is the best man in the world and she loves him just as much as she ever did. But that doesn’t mean that everything is always just 100% peachy and great. The truth is sometimes she is so tired she could scream like Bell, and Scott, well, he...drives her up the wall with his cheerfulness and the way he makes it all look _so_ easy. (And it’s so much easier for him to make it look easy because he is the one who gets to go skating all day while she drowns in screams and diapers. So it’s not exactly fair.) But it’s really okay. It’s to be to expected. They’re fine. She just has to remind herself of that. Sometimes. Occasionally. Once or twice a day.

 

 _We’re fine_ , she tells herself when she meets every morning as if it was a sportif challenge, trying to juggle being three women at once: the mother, the wife and the entrepreneur. Sadly, no matter how hard she tries, she always seems to fail spectacularly at one at a time. And like she can only be one of the three and lately it’s just been mother. Mother. _Mother._ Sometimes she catches her reflection in the mirror and doesn’t recognise herself. She’s put on at least five kilos, her nose is driving her crazy (again) and the circles under her eyes are apparently there to stay. Half the time she feels disgusting and sweaty because she’s running around so much and Scott barely makes a move on her anymore...which is obviously because she got wrinkly and fat and gross.

 

She needs to exercise more but she doesn’t know _when._ And she needs to read a book (and to _write_ a book but that’s not happening at all). Honestly, she just needs a break. But there isn’t one...there is just her life which is her kids and her marriage, which she sometimes feels like she forgot how it works. How to be close to Scott without wanting to do his head in. And it’s not even his fault. He’s doing so great, it’s her that is wrong and struggling. She never wanted to be this, to feel like a miserable housewife overwhelmed with the kids. She wanted to do it like her mother: raise her kids and have a killer career at the same time. But now she’s at home. With a career that’s not much of anything. Like it’s the fifties. But she _needs_ to be. She has two young kids, goddammit. That’s _life. So suck it the fuck up, T_ , she blasts at herself. And goes about her day.

 

This particular day doesn’t get much better than the last after Scott leaves but at least, this time her employees can actually work in their office. Of course Scott doesn’t get in before seven PM but she is hardly surprised. At least he cooks for her and bathes the baby. Later that night, Tessa has snuggled in under her blankets, her ears still ringing from putting an arguing Bellamy to bed that (for once) not even Scott got to behave and go to sleep without a fuss.

 _Suits him right_ , she thinks, watching her husband’s frown deepen as he rubs his temple settling in next to her. It’s good that he gets a taste of what she deals with while he’s gone all day. And she has little sympathy for him as he whines about how his ears hurt.

“The publisher called,” she says after ignoring him blabbering for a while, not in the mood to coddle him about Bell’s volume. “They asked me if I can make the first deadline.”

“I thought that was a tentative one?” He asks and turns to his side to look at her.

 

“Yeah. And I’m missing it, I’m never gonna make that,” she groans and he catches her cheek with his fingers, tracing the line of her jaw absent-mindedly.

“You’ll get there, you’ll be fine,” he hums and gives her that look, that look he has when he isn’t really listening because he’s thinking about getting into her pants (which, yeah, she would like but she’s a bit annoyed at getting platitudes instead of him actually paying attention to her problems. He only thinks about sex right now and that’s just...not what she’s looking for at the moment.)

 

“How?” She snaps, icily, her face a challenge.

“Just…you’ll figure it out,” he mutters, not even catching her death glare because he’s staring forlornly at her mouth, moves his fingers lower on her neck, sweeping his thumb with a little pressure along her windpipe and her breath hitches despite herself. ( _Damn conditioning_.)

“You always do,” his voice is low and raspy, like he’s already giving up on trying to have a conversation. He rocks forward, closer to her, pressing a soft kiss onto the corner of her mouth. His breath is hot and minty and she is very tempted to let him make out with her but she’s not in the best mood for it. She has issues and he’s not listening.

 

“I don’t have time. I don’t have _any_ time,” she complains and wiggles out of his grip to sit up and yaps at the far wall. “The company is all over the place, I have a bunch of other deadlines for the dance-wear line that we really have no hope in hell to meet. If I want to get the stop abuse campaign for the charity out before the end of the year, I’m already two months late. I need to book press for that and finalise the design for the shirts and get the website up and running and I have no content written and not enough girls to come forward and Bellamy and Mia just, they don’t quit either. I can’t write that book, I don’t know when. And I’m always tired. I’m so fucking tired.” (She curses expressly to let him know that she isn’t playing around.)

 

“It’ll be fine, kiddo. You always pull through with everything,” Scott murmurs, sitting up too, attaching himself to her shoulder with his mouth, speaking between pecking at her skin with lips and teeth. “I believe in you, I know you can do it.” He makes his way higher on her neck again, leading with his nose until his lips catch her earlobes in a bite. The next time he speaks, it’s past a rush of blood to her ear and goosebumps springing to life unbidden. His voice is utterly betraying his cockiness. “Let’s just get some sleep then, eh?”

 

And then he lets her go, plops back onto his back to a heavy shudder of the bed and Tessa scoffs. If he thinks he can tease her, he’s wrong. So she just falls back next to him and extends her arm to switch off her bedside lamp. Yeah, she’s keyed up now and wants him but she’s not going to do him the favour of begging. If he wants sex for once, he can put a little more effort in.

 

“Babe,” Scott’s voice flits through the darkness after a while.

“What?” Tessa asks curtly.

“I don’t really wanna sleep,” he confesses.

“But you should, you’ll be cranky in the morning if you don’t,” she prophesies.

“Don’t care,” he declares and then he’s on her, putting a little more effort in, so she goes along with it. She’s not too picky or hard to get these days.

 

She ends up being right, either way. Scott’s in a foul mood all through breakfast the next morning but this time when he leaves, she gets a proper kiss goodbye. With tongue and all. So that’s something. It’s just that when he comes home again that night, there’s nothing left of that fiery, stubborn want for her. It has completely dissipated to tiredness again, which leads to Tessa being snippy and short with him and eventually bunkering herself into her office about an hour after he’s come home and did so by slamming the door shut.

 

Which she has positively never done since they moved in together. Scott follows her about two minutes after she’s done it. She can see him approach the glass door looking into the office with a puzzled look on his face and Mia on his hips who is playing with his silver necklace.

“Tess?” He asks through the door, knocking once (which is completely superfluous because he then opens the door anyway without waiting for her “enter” and sticks his shaggy head through...he needs a haircut again). “Come on, talk to me. What is it?” She studies her latest spreadsheet on her laptop intensely instead of looking at him. “Tess?” She holds up a hand to signal him to _give her a second, she is obviously doing something!_ But he doesn’t care. “Tessa!”

 

“Please just leave me alone for a bit,” she says, her eyes flitting up to him for a second and then back to her work again. She really can’t deal with his puppy dog eyes right now.

“Kiddo…,” he says and there is almost exasperation in his voice, which she does not appreciate right now _at all._

“Please, Scott,” she says and pinches the bridge of her nose, “just get the kids and…let me deal with this on my own. I need some me-time right now...and get some work done.”

“No,” Scott says and she knows that his whole demeanour reverts back to thirteen without having to look.

“What do you mean, no?” She challenges and now she fixes him, a death glare from what it feels like in her skull.

 

“I mean _no_ ,” he says and meets it with his own. “Something is up with you and you can’t call _introvert_ this time, you’ve not seen anybody all day.”

(Ain’t that true? All she ever sees are three adult employees who get more disgruntled by the day and two continuously cranky toddlers. That’s it. Well, and her husband for like half an hour each morning and about three at night, if she’s lucky).

“And that’s not how we do things,” Scott barrels on. “We don’t just let the other deal with their shit on their own. We support each other.”

 

“Oh, do we now?” She scoffs.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” This inflection, of course, he picks up on immediately...but not on the fact that he has carelessly thrown his gym bag on the couch AGAIN even though she has asked him a _million_ times to just please put it straight in the laundry room and, what have you, maybe even turn a machine on while he’s in there but no, that’s too much to ask of a man in his mid-thirties apparently.

 

“Nothing,” she huffs out and shakes her head. “It means nothing. Please, Scott, I am tired and stressed and I have all this stuff to sort through. If you wanna help, just take the kids for two hours and I’ll be fine. I really just need to...recharge the batteries.”

“We should talk about this,” Scott says but stays where he is, keeping the barrier of the doorway intact. “If something is bothering you, you should tell me.” He waits then, for her to offer up whatever. She doesn’t and so he gives up. “Fine. I love you, T.”

“I love you, too,” she says. She means it, of course she does, but loving him doesn’t really do much for her that very night.

 

It gets better the week after because her mother comes to visit for the end-of-year-charity-high season. It’s a blessing that she does because besides helping take care of the kids, she also goes ahead and puts the finishing touches on the Christmas fundraiser dinner Tessa is throwing. Kate helps oversee it too, and has an eye on her grandchildren the night of the event so that Tessa and Scott can slow-dance to some cheesy Christmas music and remember for at least six minutes that they had been dancers once upon a time and had been quite good at it too.

 

After all that is done, Tessa breathes long and hard the day she locks up her office after Connor, Trudy and Claudia have left for their holidays and smiles. They did okay. The “No Abuse” campaign has been pushed into the next year but that actually gives them a little more wiggle room to make it better, her dance-wear line is almost good to go and the fundraiser was a raging success. So she’s in a good place and happy to go home and be with her family for the holidays. She’s fully prepared to get into the minivan with Scott and their children three days before Christmas and get into the season’s spirit on their way to London.

 

Unfortunately, the 12 hour drive (including tedious gas station breaks), is the worst thing that has happened to her since for a while they thought Mia was going to be breech. It starts out nice enough...until they get on the highway and then the children both decide to get into a screaming match (because Bellamy throws a tantrum and Mia cries because she doesn’t know what’s going on). Two hours later when they’re both finally asleep, Tessa is so on edge that after twenty-six years, when Hall&Oates comes on and Scott groans and attempts to skip the song, she finally snaps at him about it. She hisses under her breath, like a viper, a roughly five minute monologue about how she’s had it with him always making fun of her for it and that he still has to bring it up anytime people will listen and that he could just maybe, _maybe_ leave her the little joy she has in listening to the songs after the crap winter she’s had and everything.

 

They actually fight then —because somehow Scott can abide Hall&Oates _that_ little that he actually gets argumentative and snippy— in hushed tones so as to not wake the kids, and eventually, she just clenches her jaw shut and refuses to talk to him for the length of an entire audio-book. Once they finally drive into London and get to their house, they’re civil again but she’s still angry. The next morning when they drive to the Moirs in Ilderton, she’s _still_ moderately pissed off but she doesn’t show it. Scott knows though, which is why he is extra attentive all day, which makes it a little better but still not _good._

 

If Alma and Joe notice that anything is off, they don’t let it on and instead dote on the grandkids and around midday, Tessa decides to just enjoy seeing her family once again, happy to see Charlie and Danny and their families and talk to Scott’s nieces and nephews who are getting so big so fast, she wonders where the time’s gone. Tessa smiles watching Charlotte carrying Mia around and telling her about the Christmas ornaments (there’s one for each Moir kid, cousin and grandkid) and shows her the new one of Mia, hanging next to Bell, heir little faces glued onto star-shaped gold paper and hung on the tree right under the one of Scott as a kid and one of Tessa that they added when she was ten and started stopping by on the second day of Christmas every year.

 

Tessa also smiles seeing Scott and his brothers get into their winter coats and take all the kids to have a romp in the snow outside and by the time her husband gets back in, she lets him kiss her on the lips. He’s not all the way forgiven and she’s still bothered underneath it all but she’s ready to admit that his lack of musical appreciation for one of her favourite bands isn’t really the reason for it.

 

“This is nice, huh?” Scott says to her that night over an elaborate order-in sushi dinner that they splurged on to celebrate his parents keeping the kids over for the night to give them a little quality time. “A nice change of scenery? It’s good to get out every once in a while.”

“Yeah,” she nods and picks another piece of the california roll from her plate.

“It’s been a good year,” Scott continues, searching for approval in her eyes. “I think we did pretty well with the second kid, eh?”

“Yeah, pretty good,” she agrees half-heartedly, trying to decipher what tastes off about that sushi she just put in her mouth. Coriander. Ugh. Why would they put _that_ in there? Her eyes catch on the snow falling in the backyard and she already misses the view. It’s a shame because she really loves this house but she has decided in the morning that they should move their London base. It’s time.

 

“T, are you here at all? Come on, we got all this nice food and the wine…and the night to ourselves,” he says and winks appropriately, going for a sultry voice. “Let’s date a bit, yeah? Talk to me.”

“Sorry, I’m just a bit distracted,” she says and takes his hand to squeeze it reassuringly. He doesn’t deserve her aloofness, he’s been trying really hard all day. “I’m thinking we should rent out the house.”

“This one?” He says and she looks at him in time to see his baffled expression at her sudden change of subject.

“Yeah,” she replies.

“But you love this house?” He squeezes her hand back and inclines his head, his face a question mark.

 

“I do…but you’re finally about finished with yours and it doesn’t make sense to keep up three houses here,” she shrugs. “The cottage and _one_ of ours is enough. It would be too much of a strain for the up-keep. And we’re barely here anyway.”

“We could put mine out for rent too, that’s fine,” he offers and she can tell that he means it (even if it would kill him).

“No,” she insists. “You built that… _we_ designed that. No, this house…that’s the one to go.”

“If that’s what you want,” he concedes but studies her like she is not telling him the whole truth and he is trying to figure her out. “But we really don’t need to…”

“No, it makes the most sense,” she cuts in before they start going in circles. “Let’s date then, shall we?”

 

They eat together and talk about their family, about the nieces and nephews and how time flies, about his parents and Danny’s Tessa who just had shoulder surgery and can’t lift her arms properly and how people now make T-Rex jokes about her and after dessert, when he takes her by the hand to the master bedroom that still looks like the myriad of hotel rooms where most of their love story blossomed in their early years, she is ready for everything he wants to do with her.

 

Except what he winds up doing, which is to cuddle up next to her in bed, both of them in their underwear, and then starts to probe for her _feelings._

“Will you tell me what the matter is, finally?” He asks, bunching his pillow up under his grip, settling in for some deep talk and she half wants to shake him , her body running cold after it has built itself up for some intimacy after weeks and weeks and being stopped short.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she says and tries her hardest not to sound exasperated.

“T. Honestly. I’ve known you twenty-six years, if you remember,” her husband chides and honestly, she should have known this was coming (ten plus years of marriage counselling will do that to a relationship and Scott has never not been able to pick up on her moods). “You’re not happy. You’re not happy with _me_ , for some reason. And I think you should spit it out. I don’t wanna close out ’23 with you like this. Just say it. Whatever it is, just let it out.”

 

“Everything’s fine,” she tells him her party-line. The mantra she has been sticking to for months.

“No, it isn’t,” he clamours for contact, tugging on her blanket to put his hand on her chest, working it down to twine into her long hair. “Kiddo.” It’s a plea that she can’t heed. She doesn’t know how to. She can’t tell him what’s wrong because plainly, she hasn’t allowed herself to put it into words yet. So all she can do is look at him and try to say it with her face, biting down on her lip. But it doesn’t seem to translate...he looks none the wiser.

 

“Fine, then. I’ll start,” he huffs and scoots even closer, if that’s possible. “If you won’t tell me what bugs you, I’ll tell you what bugs me.”

“Stuff _bugs_ you?” She says and hears how sharp her tone is. It’s so sharp, Scott stops twirling her hair and just holds it for a second.

“Yeah,” he says.

“You?” She asks again, her voice slipping up a few octaves into definite ‘peeved’ territory.

“Ah, see,” Scott says and looks almost triumphant. “Do you wanna start after all?”

“No, I wanna hear this,” this says and rocks away from him. He holds on to her hair anyway.

“This, right here, this bugs me,” he says. “Where we are right now. The way we’re making small talk over sushi like we first met three days ago. This disconnect. You’re holding back and I don’t know why.”

 

Tessa stays mum, heat rising in her cheeks from the call-out. This is a difficult conversation and their last therapy session has been before Mia was born, due to the time crunch of everything and so she feels ill-equipped and rusty to start it. She wants JF. Almost enough to stop Scott and call him.

“No comment? At all?” Scott cuts in before she can. “Very well, then. I have more. The hair on the shower wall. Drives me crazy. I don’t know why you do that. I don’t know why I always have to pluck them off the tiles and throw them out. You should be doing that.”

“Oh, obviously,” Tessa says and shoots up to sit and glare down at him, falling way too easily for his ploy to annoy her enough to react. “Like I should be doing everything else in this family.” And whoomp, there it is.

 

“Sorry, what?” Scott asks, doing a veritable double-take and suddenly doesn’t sound so triumphant anymore.

“Nothing,” Tessa snaps like a turtle and crosses her arms, staring at her chair in the corner.

“No, no, no, hold up. Is that it?” He asks and bends forward to get into her line of sight, to wiggle in and make her look at him. “Is that why you won’t talk to me for weeks now? I’m not pulling my weight?”

“You’re never there, Scott,” she mutters and turns her head to him, holding his stare. He wanted this, so now he needs to deal with it.

 

“What?!” He nearly yelps. And she can count the seconds in her head, able to anticipate the moment when he’ll blow up (because he does not want to hear this from her because it’s secretly his biggest fear and she is well aware of it...she’s just hit so far home, it’s gonna get ugly now). Three, two, one. “I’m there! I _am_ there, T, I’m always there. Every time that I possibly can, I kiss my kids good morning and good night. Every spare minute I have I spend with them! I take them to the rink, I take them to the zoo. I take them out to the park when you burrow yourself in and hide from the world. I am _there_.”

 

“Oh, but you’re _not._ Not for the worst of it!” She insists hotly, shaking her head at him and feeling her body flush with dread. She hates this conversation, hates how instantly angry she is, how little she feels in control of the situation and her own temper, hates that she doesn’t know what she’s going to say. Helpless, as the words keep spilling from her mouth like a clogged pipe bursting free. “You’re the great fun dad they _love_ because you only see them on their best behaviour on the weekends. You don’t have to deal with Bellamy’s tantrums or with Mia refusing to eat just for the heck of it. You come home at the end of the day to your perfect little angels and sweep in and get to be the cool Dad.”

“That’s not fair,” Scott grits out, his voice trembling from the strain to keep calm even though she knows he is _livid._ Ah, she hasn’t heard _that_ tone from him in a very, very long time. It’s exactly why she didn’t want to talk about it, she can already feel herself crumble into a sliver next to him. “I’m here just as much as I was with Bell.”

 

“But it’s not just Bell anymore,” she says. “There’s two of them now. And my career that’s slipping through my fingers more every day.”

“That’s not what I want,” he barks, disappropriate for what he’s trying to communicate and well aware of it by the looks of it but barging on regardless. “What? Do you want me to quit? Do you want me to quit coaching? ‘Cause I will.”

“No,” she says like a shot because that is truly not what she wants. “No, I would never ask that of you.”

“But you’re just gonna sit here and call me an absent father if I don’t?” He asks, voice rising and she knows there’s no pulling him back now. “Is that what it’s gonna be?”

“I’m not calling you an absent father,” she shoots, even if it’s no use. But honestly, she doesn’t even want to smooth it over right now, because she _has_ been doing all the work at home lately and he _has_ been gone for most of it. She _has_ turned into a plain old struggling stay-at-home Mom reliant on her husband to bring home the funds. And that had never been supposed to happen.

 

“Aren’t you?” Scott challenges, turning around where he sits, crossing his legs to face her fully. “Because that’s kinda what it sounded like. And that’s not fair, T. I make all the time I can. Every minute. And I make them worth it.”

“Yeah, for them,” she scoffs.

“Excuse me?” That’s nearly a whine.

“I said you make it worth it for _them_ ,” she repeats and stares him down. “You’re not with me at all. Half the time I think I’m invisible. Do you even like me anymore? Do you even see me? Do you even want me still?”

“Of course I do,” he says like a gunshot and looks at her like she’s grown a second head. And like he’s furious for her even asking such a preposterous thing.

 

“Why don’t you touch me then? Scott, we haven’t had sex in almost a month,” she says and slaps her hands down hard onto her thighs, then rips the blanket off of her because she’s running so hot, she thinks she might be burning from the inside out. “Half the time I feel like I’m your _sister._ For the first time I actually feel like your fucking business partner. So no, you’re not there. You’re not there with _me._ ” She hasn’t even realised the scope of her unhappiness until he made her put it into words but now that she’s started, she can’t stop.

 

“I’m nothing but a Mom anymore,” she says and suddenly she has to talk through a lump in her throat. “A Mom with her pet projects. And all you got for me when I feel like I’m crumbling every day under the pressure is Hallmark-Card quotes and then you wanna go to sleep. What are we even doing, then?”

“So this is about sex?! Babe, I love the sex,” he says and shakes his head at her as if she’s lost her mind. “I could always sleep with you, I always _want_ to.”

“Nearly four weeks, Scott!” She exclaims hotly. “That’s not what it feels like.”

“But we’re busy and we’re tired and half the time it’s you who goes to bed before me,” he breathes in frustration and puts both his hands on her knees. “What do you expect me to do? Just wake you up in the middle of the night with my dick?”

“Why not?” She asks.

“Because you would kill me and you know it!” He nearly yells and she flinches back but only so she can snap back at him again.

 

“So that’s that? We’re busy and tired and that’s why you’re not sleeping with me?” She bellows, irrational and unfair (but she won’t own up to that until much later). “We were busy and tired all the way from 2016 to 2018 and we were having sex like idiots. That’s a crap excuse. So what is it, really? Are you not attracted to me anymore? Are you _bored_? Am I not exciting enough anymore? Or is there someone else? Huh?”

“Are you crazy?” He asks and cuts her off when she opens her mouth. “No, I am not asking! Have you lost your actual mind?” And then he surprises her like he was bound to. By bending over quickly, grabbing her by the neck and crashing his lips on hers, kissing her hard and hungry, to make his point with his body where his words fail to. When he pulls away she opens her eyes to his, dark and longing.

 

“How can you believe even for a second that there could be anybody else? Or that I don’t _want_ you anymore?” He grabs her hair harshly to yank her head back and kiss her neck wildly, with a good amount of teeth and anger, and bites his words into her skin. “Right now, I’m going to fuck the shit out of you because you’re driving me insane and I love you, okay? I love you much, so just let me _show_ you? And then we will _talk_ about this. Alright?”

“Fine,” Tessa grunts and next thing she knows, she’s buried under him as he wedges himself between her legs and pushes his hips into hers, hands gentle on her frame but still decisive, still sure as ever of how to touch her to make her keen and move with him. That's still the best thing she ever gets to do...moving with Scott Moir.

 

She arches into it, unsure if she’s turned on or just angry but it doesn’t really matter because it has the same result, she's crazy for him. He claws at her, rough and urgent and has her out of her panties and himself stark naked before she even has time to process it. Just as fast, he’s pushed into her to the hilt and hovers over her for a moment, looking down at her, his face twisted into a harsh mix of need and love and fury and pulls almost entirely out to thrust back inside deliberately. 

 

“I love you,” he huffs raspily as he starts moving and there is fear and pain behind his eyes. She’s scared him and she knows it and he doesn’t deserve that. He deserves a conversation...and honesty on her part. Communication, like they’ve learned and she has forgotten over having two babies apparently. She spreads her legs wider, tilts her hips up and groans. He understands and ever so slowly, through pushing and pulling at each other, at hair and arms and backs, they find their way back together.

 

When they come, it’s face to face, their pace deliberate and intimate, the anger dissolved into languid affection. It’s their own kind of dance with the best kind of resolution. Finding themselves again within their new world which is so different from anything they’ve done together so far. But they’ve always been good at dancing. After, Scott moves her gently onto his chest and runs his hand over her back, soothing and without hurry. He takes a long while to breathe with her, kissing her head and working through what he wants to say. She can feel it in his energy, surging around her before he finally starts to speak.

 

“Sometimes we will be busy and weeks will go by until there’s proper time to make love,” he begins. “But I want you every day, no matter if I can act on it or not. Do you think you can you believe that?”

“I'll try to remind myself,” she mutters and vows to be honest. “But you’re right. I’m not happy.” As soon as she says it, she feels him go rigid beneath him, his heartbeat hammering against her cheek. “I’m happy with _you_ ,” she hurries to clarify. “I’m not happy with the situation I am in.”

 

“You’re overworked,” he tells her softly. “You got way too much on your plate. And you’re right, I’m gone too much. I’ll call Patch and scale back on the coaching.”

“No. No, don’t. I’ll be fine, I’ll handle it,” she says, squeezing him close for emphasis, willing for his pulse to slow down. “Your teams need you. Plus the season is going, you can’t just pull out mid-game, that’s not fair to anybody. I’ll just try and get out of the book deal and…maybe push the clothing line.”

“No, kiddo. That’s not an option,” he says decidedly. “Your career is just as important as mine. We’re not sacrificing that. Let’s just get help, okay? Let’s get a nanny or…an AuPair, someone to come live with us. We can get someone from France so the kids can learn to speak French.” His voice brightens, like he knows he’s onto something. “Have someone there in the thick of it with us, yeah? So we can make more time for each other, too. I don’t want you to feel like I want or need you any less than I always have. Because I do. I love you so much and I want you like crazy, like completely stupidly, always. You have to know that.”

 

“I do.” She _does._ “I’m just frustrated. I expected this all to be easier. After Bell…I thought it would just stay this easy but it’s not. I don’t _want_ to be aloof. I don’t _want_ to doubt you. I don’t want to nag and be difficult.”

“You’re not,” he says under his breath. “You’re carrying the brunt of it right now and I’m not there to help enough. I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything the seven-hundred times you asked,” she whispers, turning her forehead into his chest, ashamed of herself and feels stupid. This is Scott...who can she be real with if not with him? It’s silly...she should be better than that.

“Maybe we should give JF a call once we’re back in Montreal?” Scott suggests and she almost laughs because he pretty much just read her mind.

“Definitely,” she chuckles. “And we should probably get help, right? Maybe an AuPair wouldn’t be the worst idea.”

“We’ll figure it out, alright?” He reassures her gently. “We’re still together in this.”

“Together?” She asks.

“Together,” he says and scratches her skin lightly, pausing for that before he talks again. “Are you tired, babe? Because if you're not I’d like to get a little bit more out of our free night...if you’re up for it.”

 

Tessa answers him without words this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, thoughts? I would love to hear them! I am really excited about the concept and really nervous about how you guys feel about it :)


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